This report looks at how staff at eight academic institutions gained
new insight about how students and faculty use their libraries, and how
the staff are using these findings to improve library technologies,
space, and services.

Participatory design is a relatively recent approach to understanding
library user behavior. It is based on techniques used in
anthropological and ethnographic observation. The report's editor,
anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster, led several participatory design workshops for CLIR from 2007 to 2013.